Was the Estado Novo good or bad?

[Sol]

?

[politicus]

?

Better than most other dictatorships, but obviously still bad.

(and the lady in my sig and her people would say horrible)

[Cassius]

On balance, a good thing while it lasted.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

I generally disapprove of fascist military dictatorships.

[TNF]

I generally disapprove of fascist military dictatorships.

[Sol]

To answer the question, I say no.

Wikipedia seems weirdly favorable to them however, so I was wondering if that was just random Portuguese nationalists or some positive elements (not that such things really would hugely impact my opinion).

[politicus]

To answer the question, I say no.

Wikipedia seems weirdly favorable to them however, so I was wondering if that was just random Portuguese nationalists or some positive elements (not that such things really would hugely impact my opinion).

The Salazar regime gets a positive evaluation simply because its compared with Franco's Spain and to a lesser degree other dictatorships in Europe and Latin America. It was relatively mild in its oppression, but that only applies in Europe. If you include the colonial wars (mostly after Salazar's death) and the oppression and atrocities committed in Africa, the level of horribleness increases quite a bit.

[Simfan34]

Which one?

[politicus]

Which one?

Since he is talking about Portuguese nationalists defending it, I assume its the Portuguese.

[SNJ1985]

On balance, a good thing while it lasted.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

On balance, a good thing while it lasted.

Of course you two think it was good.

[pendragon]

To answer the question, I say no.

Wikipedia seems weirdly favorable to them however, so I was wondering if that was just random Portuguese nationalists or some positive elements (not that such things really would hugely impact my opinion).

The Salazar regime gets a positive evaluation simply because its compared with Franco's Spain and to a lesser degree other dictatorships in Europe and Latin America. It was relatively mild in its oppression, but that only applies in Europe. If you include the colonial wars (mostly after Salazar's death) and the oppression and atrocities committed in Africa, the level of horribleness increases quite a bit.

Well, prior to the lovely, non-oppressive rule of the MPLA and FRELIMO, Angola and Mozambique were relatively nice places by African standards (nice enough that over a million Europeans would voluntarily live in them, and people would describe Luanda as "the Paris of Africa" without irony), and afterwards the two countries were consumed in an orgy of mass-murder the likes of which the world has rarely seen, leaving over 2 million dead and the countries reduced to burned-out, hopeless hellscapes.

So I'm willing to cut the Portuguese a little slack on their African human rights record, just as I might for Poland in 1939. Yes, they are far from perfect, but consider the alternative!

[politicus]

To answer the question, I say no.

Wikipedia seems weirdly favorable to them however, so I was wondering if that was just random Portuguese nationalists or some positive elements (not that such things really would hugely impact my opinion).

The Salazar regime gets a positive evaluation simply because its compared with Franco's Spain and to a lesser degree other dictatorships in Europe and Latin America. It was relatively mild in its oppression, but that only applies in Europe. If you include the colonial wars (mostly after Salazar's death) and the oppression and atrocities committed in Africa, the level of horribleness increases quite a bit.

Well, prior to the lovely, non-oppressive rule of the MPLA and FRELIMO, Angola and Mozambique were relatively nice places by African standards (nice enough that over a million Europeans would voluntarily live in them, and people would describe Luanda as "the Paris of Africa" without irony), and afterwards the two countries were consumed in an orgy of mass-murder the likes of which the world has rarely seen, leaving over 2 million dead and the countries reduced to burned-out, hopeless hellscapes.

So I'm willing to cut the Portuguese a little slack on their African human rights record, just as I might for Poland in 1939. Yes, they are far from perfect, but consider the alternative!

Two wrongs don't make a right. Furthermore you can't place continued Portuguese rule as the alternative to FRELIMO and MPLA. No Afrcans would have accepted European rule in the 70s. So that line of argumentation is meaningless.  

The brutalization of a society doesn't (normally, Kampuchea may partially be an exception) just happen from day to day. The sort of atrocities committed in the civil wars in Mozambique and Angola were a direct continuation of the atrocities under the liberation wars, so the brutality in the former affected the latter.

And being nice for White people isn't all that relevant in this context. Portugese colonial rule was far more brutal than British or French (especially post WW2).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you do want to play the comparison game (and I don't) remember, that unlike Angola the civil war in Mozambique was an artificial war created by the South Rhodesian intelligence service to destabilize the country and continued by apartheid  South Africa. Otherwise the country would have turned in to the same sort of relatively benign one party state as Tanzania, which would have been a clear improvement over Portuguese rule.

The two countries have developed differently afterwards. FRELIMO voluntarily gave up their monopoly on power in 1992 holding free elections and Mozambique is a democracy today (having a free election next month). Not a perfect democracy, but one of the better countries in Africa for sure.
Angola is oil rich, but a far more sinister place. But here South African destabilization obviously also played a big role in prolonging the civil war (sometimes it doesn't matter much who win a civil war for ordinary folks, as long as the war ends).

[pendragon]

Two wrongs don't make a right.

It is most certainly possible to chose a right amongst two wrongs. If someone were to go into great detail about interwar Poland's military dictatorship and shabby treatment of minorities, and insist that they can't pick a side in 1939 because "two wrongs don't make a right," and say that the German invasion was caused by irresistible historical forces because the Germans would never accept the Polish humiliations, and say that the Holocaust was "started by Polish violence," then one might, rightly, suspect through the computer screen that that hypothetical person has a swastika tattooed on their neck.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Pure Whig history. Anywhere and everywhere there are discovered "irresistible forces," beginning with the irresistible forces that decapitated 40,000 people in Paris, and quickly blossoming into new irresistible forces that add additional zeroes to that number. Lenin - an irresistible force. Mao Zedong - irresistible force. Pol Pot - irresistible force. Robert Mugabe - irresistible force. etc.

What all the "irresistible forces" have in common is that they're all mass murderers who made their countries into living hells, and all the irresistible forces of history seem to follow the principle of pas d'ennemis a gauche, pas d'amis a droit.

The "irresistible force" stuff is BS, meant as a rhetorical dodge to avoid appearing to either be in favor of horrific explosions of mass murder or to be in support of nasty right-wingers, who may have even been corrupt and/or racist. But in the real world, any force can be resisted, and so when there are two sides you must pick one. Just like all the other "irresistible forces," the MPLA/FRELIMO met quite a bit of resistance. In fact, the Portuguese had done a pretty bang-up job resisting prior to the 1974 coup.

Look at these guys - an irresistible historical force! And, yet, somehow, they were resisted. Look; another irresistible historical force! And yet one that, like other irresistible historical forces that represented the true national aspirations of the people, all throughout the world, mysteriously disappeared circa 1991.

Mysteriously also, the MPLA found that the 40,000 pallid-by-Angolan-standards Cubans and Bulgarians they had fighting on their side later on were quite effective in battle, the undying national resolve of Angolans never again to surrender to caucasians notwithstanding.

Furthermore, let's even say they were "irresistible forces." The Wehrmacht was certainly an irresistible force for Poland in 1939; doesn't mean that I have to be in favor of it.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The Holocaust would never have happened if the Polish depravities hadn't set the scene!

About 500,000 Angolans and 150,000 Mozambicans met their end in "reeducation camps," which were decidedly unnecessary for the war effort. (It is also curious how all the other MPLA/FRELIMO atrocities are excused as being necessary for the war effort, and yet that's no excuse for the Portuguese whom they outdid by two orders of magnitude).

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course it's relevant. Europeans have certain standards of living that must be met before they will consider voluntarily living somewhere, including:

1. The levels of crime and violence are low.
2. Government officials are helpful, competent, and neither corrupt nor prone to random or sadistic violence.
3. One is not living amongst filth.
4. One is not living in a place surrounded by people dying of disease or starvation.

If Angola or Mozambique were to meet those standards once more, it would represent an enormous increase in the standard of living of everyone in those countries, of any race.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

FRELIMO itself of course being a totally indigenous organization representing the irresistible national aspirations of the Mozambican people and not at all created and wholly funded by the KGB in order to provoke war.

Oh, wait:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Hmm....

I think I'd also much rather live in Mozambique 1974 (with the proviso that the Portuguese colonial regime continue indefinitely) than Mozambique 2014, but perhaps I'm just a bit of an odd duckling.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Have you ever seen the documentary Africa Addio? There's a scene shot from a helicopter that you might find rather revealing. It gives you a pretty good idea of just how "benign" Tanzania was.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Hmm....

[Indy Texas]

It would be far less futile to just accept that the lion's share of Africa's present problems can be fairly laid at the doorsteps of European resource extractors who treated entire swaths of the continent like pieces of fruit whose flesh was to be ripped out and concentrated so that the husks and the depleted tree could be left and forgotten, and of American and Soviet foreign ministers who used Africa as a board to play a giant, 40-year long game of Risk with politicians, warlords and child-soldiers as the playing pieces.

[Sol]

It would be far less futile to just accept that the lion's share of Africa's present problems can be fairly laid at the doorsteps of European resource extractors who treated entire swaths of the continent like pieces of fruit whose flesh was to be ripped out and concentrated so that the husks and the depleted tree could be left and forgotten,

While this is absolutely true, I think it does sometimes tend to be a little bit reductive on the ground- I've seen way too many accounts regarding the DRC that jump from the Congo Free State to the present day, while skimming over Mobutu and Rwandan invasion. Of course this serves U.S. interests just fine, considering who Kagame's supporters are.

[Unimog]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Train_to_Lisbon_%28film%29

bad; being better than the nazis, doesn't make it a good a place.

i really wonder, in which systems those 'C' guy really want to live.